Stan Kroenke has been quietly sweeping up shares wherever he can find them. He is now a mere 1.04% short of the 29.9% trigger for a complete bid for the club. Whether he can spare the £460 million, in the short term to buyout the club is a different question.
Frankly after the Tom Hicks and George Gillett hatchet job at Liverpool, you have to be very wary of someone yet to pay half of the £100m he owes for the shares that he bought last December. Kroenke is also in the risky business of real estate investment which we all know is doing swimmingly poorly in this recession so he takes on even more debt in a takeover.
However, he must be looked on as one of the good guys and his alliance with Danny Fiszman keeps the share level at close to 50% effectively blocking out the unsavoury proposition of having Alisher Usmanov and his Red and White consortium assuming control. That the unaligned shareholders have not been tempted to selling their shares to Red and White is because of the antipathy felt towards Usmanov.
These checks and balances introduced by various factions may sometimes result in seeming inertia but in these troubled financial times it does Arsenal a world of good.
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